For many, there's nothing like the tactile pleasure of picking up a newspaper. The Washington Post was a refuge on the Metro before hitting the street on Connecticut and L five days a week. I still get the same feeling when I read our local - and not really stellar - paper with my coffee in the AM. I get the basics of the national and world news with the preponderance being the local news. To full in the blanks nationally and worldwide, I rely on the Nightly News Hour, Nightly Business Report, etc. (I don't have cable) And I also read the Post and several other papers on line. To round things out, I'll scroll through the "Hot Topics" forum where many posters are aware of everything and have no end of opinions to share.

Since papers rely more heavily on advertising revenues than subscriber rolls, they're surely feeling the pinch. I don't know if print media will disappear wholesale, but papers are disappearing in other ways - ours recently became an inch less wide (it IS much easier to handle and fold), some old features disappeared, opinion pages were revamped, sections combined as opposed to appearing separately, a lot of old content reappearing on their web site.

In light of technology, papers might become dinosaurs. I'd like to get through my lifetime without having to see one in a museum though.

I would so hate to not have my paper!!! but I wonder if they will be able to survive the loss of advertising to the internet, like free classified sites such as Craigslist. The internet and TV news just does not allow me to absorb and consider information like reading it in print.

qdognj: "The main problem confronting newspapers and magazines, to a lesser extent,is that people can get their news at a moments notice,either via 24 hour newschannels or the internet..."

Yes, but the main source of news on the Internet is from online versions of newspapers. And the online versions are not slef-supporting. If the papers themselves go away, so will the online versions.

This discussion reminds me of the Republican Congressman several years ago who wanted to cut funding for NOAA and the National Weather Service because he said that the private sector performed the job better and cheaper, and he pointed to the success of The Weather Channel, not realizing of course, that The Weather Channel received their information from - - ta da - - the National Weather Service!